Nigerian oil tycoon Austin Avuru co-founded Seplat and now grows tomatoes in Ogun State

Austin Avuru spent forty years in Nigerian oil and gas and co-founded Seplat, one of the country's largest independent producers. He now grows tomatoes and bell peppers in greenhouses outside Abeokuta.

The business is PSF Vegetables Limited, a subsidiary of Professional Support Farms Limited, which sits inside the family holding company Avuru created for his life after Seplat. The farm is at Kobape in Ogun State, about 80 kilometres north of Lagos.

The scale is modest and deliberately so. Each greenhouse covers 1,500 square metres. In its first year of operation the company targeted about 50 tonnes of tomatoes and more than 32 tonnes of bell peppers, and it projects reaching 172 tonnes of tomatoes and above 200 tonnes of peppers as it refines its methods.

What it sells is produce grown under cover rather than in open fields, which allows year-round cultivation in a country where tomato supply collapses seasonally and where a large share of the crop rots before it reaches market. The company says its vegetables are free of harmful chemicals and describes its approach as farm to you, meaning it sells direct rather than through wholesalers.

It works with Prime Agro Seeds on greenhouse and crop management and on seed supply, and with Profyta, a Dutch horticultural training company, on staff training.

Avuru planned all of this before he left the oil company.

He set up Austin Avuru Holdings Limited, registered in the Isle of Man and Nigeria, as a family trust to hold his business interests, and began putting the structure in place in August 2018, two years before his retirement. In his last two years at Seplat he held quarterly meetings with his mentor to work through both his succession at the company and what he would do afterwards.

The architecture he built is specific. Professional Support Limited became a wholly owned subsidiary of AA Holdings, and his Seplat shares were transferred into it. His Platform Petroleum shares were split between AA Holdings and Professional Support Limited, and his listed Nigerian equities went to AA Holdings directly. Two further subsidiaries were created, Professional Support Property Development Company for real estate and Professional Support Farms for greenhouse farming.

He moved into a new office on Sept. 1, 2020, a month after leaving Seplat. The building was not finished until the end of November.

AA Holdings describes itself as a proprietary investment company existing to advance the financial and philanthropic interests of the Avuru family, investing across energy, agriculture, real estate and listed equities. Emeka Okolo is its executive director and chief investment officer. Avuru has said the group will continue investing in upstream and midstream oil and gas, with an eye on gas processing and domestic distribution to power plants, and will expand its agricultural ventures inside Nigeria.

The route to it started at a state oil company.

Avuru was born on Aug. 17, 1958 in Ipetu-Ijesa in Osun State, to parents from Abbi in Delta State. He took a geology degree at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka in 1980, finishing as the best overall student, and later a postgraduate diploma in petroleum engineering at the University of Ibadan in 1992, again graduating top of his class. He has since completed the owner and president management programme at Harvard Business School.

He spent twelve years at the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation from 1980, working as a wellsite geologist, production seismologist and reservoir engineer. In 1992 he joined Allied Energy Resources, a pioneer deepwater operator, as exploration manager and then technical manager.

He founded Platform Petroleum in 2002 and ran it as managing director, building it from nothing to 85 staff and taking the Asuokpu and Umutu field to commercial production. He also chaired the technical subcommittee that drafted the blueprint for Nigeria's local content policy, which became the Nigerian Content Act of 2010.

Seplat came out of a merger. Platform Petroleum combined with A.B.C. Orjiako's Shebah Petroleum Development Company in 2009 to bid for assets Shell was selling down, and Avuru became the new company's first chief executive on May 1, 2010. Under him Seplat listed on both the Nigerian and London exchanges and became the country's leading indigenous independent.

He retired as chief executive in July 2020 and remained on the board for a period afterwards. He is vice chairman of Platform Petroleum, and President Bola Tinubu appointed him a non-executive director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company in April 2025, forty-five years after he first joined the organisation as a graduate.

He also chairs the AA Foundation, which funds education and healthcare projects.

The tomatoes are a small part of it. They are also the part he built himself, from the beginning, in a sector he had never worked in.